This week I decided to take a look at Aptana Jaxer – A server-side JavaScript implementation, or “Ajax Server” like their site says. It’s a bit different take on a server-side language and requires some new ways to do things.
What it basically lets you do, is completely throw away all “traditional” server-side languages, and write all your code in JavaScript. What’s more, it lets you edit the DOM of the page using the same means you would use to edit it in the browser client-side.
“Windows Vista steals your information.”
“Windows Vista does not work.”
This is getting stupid and childish. I’ve seen many people complain how Vista is not usable, how it does not work, and now, how it steals all your information and gives it to Microsoft.
Can anyone actually think these days? Can anyone actually remember how it was when Windows XP launched?
Regular Expressions – you either love them or hate them, and usually when you hate them, you just haven’t spent enough time trying to learn them! :)
They are incredibly useful, but they can often be difficult to build and test. I have previously mentioned a great tool called RegexBuddy, which is a great help.
However, being a Windows application, you might not always have your PC with it installed around. I’ve often found myself stranded, looking for a quick way to write and test a regex.
I decided to fix this problem once and for all: Say hello to the JavaScript Regex Tester!
For some reason, despite understanding a programming concept in one language can make it difficult to understand it in a different language, especially if it differs a lot from the one you know.
JavaScript is a good example of this. From experience I can say that grasping the concepts of things like MVC in JS can be slightly difficult at first.
When you are working with some highly interactive “Web 2.0” sites, you may need things like Ajax-based forms and inline editing. Maybe you can add things to a list with a dynamic form, which submits the data to the server with Ajax… Then you might have multiple listings, which may or may not need to be updated based on what you just saved.
Making a request to the server in a case like this to update all the lists is just a bit pointless, but updating them all with JS can lead to confusion. What would be the best way to approach something like this?
Zend_Form is Zend Framework’s brand new tool for simplifying form creation, parsing, validation and filtering.
There’s one big thing I want from any kind of form generation tool: The ability to let me combine my server-side validators with JavaScript validation on the client, or other such features.
And here’s the thing: Zend_Form is easily extendable to automatically generate JavaScript for validating fields on the client!
I have previously written about the Ext JS JavaScript library, and now it’s time to look at The Yahoo UI Library (YUI) – Ext began as an addon library for this one!
Yahoo has been researching various different techniques for improving website performance. There are a lot of obvious ones, such as making sure images are optimized, JavaScript/CSS is minified and so on.
There are also a couple of less known tricks, such as putting JavaScript as the last in the document, and “flushing early”.
Flushing early basically means that when you are generating your page, you should send data to the browser as soon as possible. A lot of frameworks (including Zend) buffer the whole reply before sending it, and it started bothering me…
You often hear that using PHP under Microsoft servers is a bad idea, because it doesn’t work very well.
But is that even true? You guessed it… no. It is actually possible to get a PHP based database application working under IIS and MS SQL Server perfectly fine, it just may take some configuration.
You can even get Apache mod_rewrite type of functionality under IIS with Isapi_Rewrite.
I wrote earlier a post about the back then new Zend_Layout component in Zend Framework. It’s one of my most popular posts, so I think it’s about time for me to write an updated version which actually works in ZF 1.5’s version of Zend_Layout.
We’ll look into how to get started with Zend_Layout, and we’ll also check out the new view helpers.